2010-08-29

Evoke 2010 wrapup

On Friday and Saturday I went to the Evoke 2010 in Cologne together with 0xtob. Exactly 25 hours before the 4k Intro compo deadline we started coding... Well, I haven't coded an intro ever before, 0xtob has some more experience. Plus the two other, very brilliant entries in the competition had much more time to prepare. But nevertheless we managed to submit an entry for Linux, which took about 3.2KiB.

0xtob even managed to code a minimalistic sound engine in less than an hour, so that we had at least some noise playing in the background. The whole intro is just one scene without any fading in or out so far. It's basically a raytraced implicit, morphing function (interpolating between two animated implicit functions). So we actually do not render any explicit geometry. The raytracer is written in GLSL, and the textures are a port of Ken Perlin's original improved Perlin noise to GLSL, which I somehow managed to do. The intro runs on both Linux and OS X, but on OS X it is currently about 7KiB, so not quite 4k. A Windows port will follow at some time, I guess. We are planning to clean up and beautify the intro somewhat and put it on pouet in the coming weeks.
All in all it was a lot of fun, and we got a lot of help: jix borrowed us his MBP running Linux, because the orga did not want to accept OS X as the host OS, and 0xtob's Quadro NVS was not up to the task rendering the whole thing in 720p. :) Some unknown guy borrowed us the MDP to DVI adapter. Robert helped to crunch the binary to minimal size, and also made the shader more colourful than ever. Roman gave helpful hints and was another pair of eyes watching over the code.

well, i have been at the evoke before. 1998 that is. was a bit involved in a diskmag back then. i stopped following the scene shortly thereafter. but this was fun. i think doing 4k or 64k could still be interesting and challenging. the big demos somehow bore me.

i agree that most big demos nowadays often fail to impress, but i guess it's because the effort required to push the edge there is getting too high - no wonder the best groups like fairlight, tbl, plastic, etc. all consist of pros that do graphics code or 3d animation in their day job.

nevertheless, this one still impresses me a lot:http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=55556

anyways, just ping me if you feel like doing a little 4k/64k coop some time: j-ar[at]gmx[dot]net

yes, nice demo. i think they showed that at the evoke as well. what bothers me with the large demos is, that they are not so much about technical achievement and innovative algorithms, but rather good design. which is an important point, but the original ideas of the demo scene get a bit lost. demos using mp3 or ogg files as sound tracks also just don't seem right. :)